A little niche in the vast expanse of the internet for my writing - mostly poems here, but maybe short stories and essays too.
Sonnets emerge occasionally. Comments welcome.

Thursday, 25 May 2017

Jeremy Corbyn's Dangerous Idea

(This post was originally published as an article in 2015 on another website, now defunct. It now seems relevant yet again.)

Unlike many conservatives, I wasn’t that bothered by Jeremy
Corbyn not singing the national anthem. As the columnist Peter Hitchens noted:
“The world’s full of countries where you have to salute the leader and sing the
party song in public. This isn’t one of them.”

Much more troubling than Mr Corbyn’s aversion to ‘God Save
The Queen’ are the remarks he made after the killing of Osama Bin Laden by US
special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. Interviewed by the Iranian
state broadcaster Press TV, he said:

“There was no attempt whatsoever that I could see to arrest
him and put him on trial, to go through that process…this was an assassination
attempt, and is yet another tragedy, upon a tragedy, upon a tragedy. The World
Trade Center was a tragedy, the attack on Afghanistan was a tragedy, the war in
Iraq was a tragedy. Tens of thousands of people have died.”

There are several problems here.

For one thing, Corbyn really has no way of knowing whether
or not the US soldiers who carried out the raid intended to kill Bin Laden
regardless of circumstances. Several accounts of the event describe him as
being killed while reaching for a weapon. Corbyn also displays a certain
naivete about the option of “arresting” Bin Laden, as if it were simply a
matter of sending Slipper of the Yard and two stout constables round to his
house with a warrant. And if he had been put on trial, this would have raised
its own problems—any city hosting a trial would instantly become a huge
terrorist target in its own right.

More fundamentally, he is using the word “tragedy” in such a
way as to obfuscate rather than enlighten. “Tragedy” is not a moral category.
It’s a vague and emotional term used to cover a range of bad happenings. But
not all bad happenings are bad in the same sense, to the same degree, and for
the same reasons.

Even if you think Bin Laden’s death was tragic, perhaps
because you see it as emblematic of the lawlessness and brutality of the war on
terror, or because you subscribe to John Donne’s view that “any man’s death
diminishes me/Because I am involved in mankind”, there is a problem with
lumping it together with 9/11.

The Abbottabad raid was an operation carried out by
uniformed soldiers, subject to a known chain of command as required by the
Geneva Conventions, against the admitted leader of a global terrorist
organisation, known to be responsible not just for 9/11 but for numerous other
atrocities, e.g. the African embassy bombings in 1998, whose victims were
mostly African civilians.

By contrast, on 9/11, nineteen terrorists murdered a total
of 2,977 unarmed civilians, including, lest we forget, eight small children on
the hijacked planes. The attacks continue to claim victims today, as people who
were enveloped by the clouds of dust and rubble succumb to lung disease.

To say simply that both of these events were “tragedies”,
without any further attempt to distinguish between them, is morally perverse
and evasive, a deliberate attempt to muddy the moral waters between those who
commit acts of terror against civilians and those who seek (however
imperfectly) to prevent those acts.

Mr Corbyn would doubtless argue that the response to 9/11 by
the US and its allies has been a disaster, that the US has committed its own
atrocities against non-combatants, that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
have unleashed waves of chaos, violence and misery. He would not be entirely
wrong, although there are important qualifications regarding intent, objectives
and context when comparing the actions of liberal democracies and Islamist
terror groups. Modern wars—fought against fluid, fanatical non-state
organisations who target civilians relentlessly, do not respect any of the laws
of war by which the liberal democracies are bound, and who wear no
uniform—throw up some very difficult challenges for the Western powers.

The leader of the Labour Party’s problem is that in the
realm of international affairs, he appears to be an example of that dangerous
creature, the man with one idea. That one idea is that Britain and the United
States, and their allies such as Israel, are the main sources of injustice,
disorder and terror in the world, or at least the main ones to which we should
pay attention.

It may stem from the common progressive belief that past or
current victimhood bestows special moral status on people or groups, such that
they can no longer be held to the same standards as those with “power”. This is
why he is willing to give a hearing to organisations like the IRA, or Hezbollah
and Hamas, and to resort to flannel when asked to give unequivocal
condemnations of atrocities committed by “powerless” groups; they are opposing
“imperialism” or “American hegemony” and so there must be something to be said
for them.

I do not say that there is no truth at all in this view of
things. But it is only one idea among many that are needed to understand the
world aright, and Mr Corbyn’s pronouncements on foreign policy give little
reason to believe that he has thought very deeply about the others.